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Alnitak - a practice tool of CharaChorder 3D input devices developed by Tangent

Posted on Edited on In , Symbols count in article: 4.5k Reading time ≈ 4 mins.

ℹ️ Disclaimer: This tool is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with CharaChorder.

截圖 2025-02-19 23.15.27

Features

  • Layout Lesson
    • 3~4 keys in a small lesson
    • lessons for numbers, letters and symbols
  • Device Layout View
    • only show the labels of keys in the current lesson
    • highlight the current key(s) required to type out the character
    • can load the custom layout via the backup json file from device manager website
  • Widgets
    • combo counter that counts the number of consecutive correct keystrokes
    • speedometer that shows the current typing speed
  • Chord Practice
    • can load the chord list via the backup json file from device manager website
    • can select chords to practice from the chord list
    • only show the labels of keys from the input of the selected chords
    • highlight the keys of current chord
  • Layout Viewer
    • can view the final layout (actual output under the seleced OS keyboard layout) by layers and modifier keys (Shift and Alt Graph)
    • search for a key in the layout
    • print the final layout (or generate a pdf file of it)
  • Layout Song
    • an AI generated song that can help you that can help you memorize the letter keys on the default layout

Side Topics

Naming and Theme Color

Letting users practice around three things at a time is the first main feature I want this tool to have. (Yes, according to the rule of three.) So about the name, I started with “three” and found a Chinese word, 參. It’s the Financial form of three, and it also can mean “study” with another pronunciation in some contexts.

As a result, the first name of this project is named typing-san. The san sounds like three in Chinese (三/參) and Japanese ({三|さん}/{参|さん}), so it can mean “typing three or more things”. (三 in Chinese can mean “many” in some contexts.)

But this name is too abstract for people who know about neither Chinese nor Japanese, and it’s also hard to design a theme from such an abstract name.

Later, I found that a star mansion called 參宿 (Three Stars), so I decided to name this project as the first star in the Three Stars, 參宿一 (Alnitak). 參 can mean study, 宿 can mean place and 一 means one, so 參宿一 can be overtranslated to “Study Place for CharaChorder One” by me. And since the main star of Alnitak is a blue supergiant, I could use this as a theme color in this project, so that’s how the theme color of this tool was decided.

Design Concepts

Combo Counter

The combo counter records how many consecutive correct keystrokes have been made til now. Trying to get a higher count can be a different challenge from the typing speed or the accuracy.

As the number of combo increases, the color of the counter will change in the same way as the color temperature or the stellar color, and it pretty fits the name of this project, Alnitak, which is a star name.

Speedometer

A speedometer is a great way to visualize the current speed. The current design of speedometer is the result after collecting some dashboard or speedometer designs relating to a classic racing car anime, Future GPX Cyber Formula, and simplifying it to make it less distractive. Also, the donut sector shape really matches with the shape of the key on CC1’s layout.

The color of the meter chunk and the speed number are also changed in the same way as the color temperature or the stellar color mentioned above.

Layout song

Four days ago (2025-12-02), I watched a video. It was an AI-generated anime meme song in Taiwanese Hokkien (i.e., Taiwanese dialect). I was amazed by how well AI can generate music now. Later, I had an idea. How about using AI to make a song to help users memorize the default layout? It would definitely make learning more fun, since we’ve learnt many things with songs in our childhood, like The Alphabet Song, “Do-Re-Mi”, etc.

First, I started with the lyrics. I made a layout image with only letter keys and sent the prompt “Generate a song that helps me memorize this device layout of a 3D input device” with the image attached to several LLMs. I chose the result of Kimi K2 Thinking because it was the only one that used words to link the keys together, such as “A Tall Ninja Jumps, Yes Sir!” for the “A-T-L-N-J-Y-S” keys at the top right of the default layout.

Then I fed the lyrics above into Suno to generate a full song for them. Suno generated several songs at once, and I chose the most energetic one.

Finally, I added the song and lyrics to the layout song page on Alnitak. Additionally, there is a layout display on that page that shows and highlights the corresponding keys when the song mentions them.

Tech Stack

Layout Song

Other References